Google has acquired visual travel guide and tour review site Ruba.com. Based in Palo Alto, CA, Ruba was founded by serial entrepreneurs Mike Cassidy and Arnaud Weber.

Published: 24 May 2010

Google has acquired visual travel guide and tour review site Ruba.com. Based in Palo Alto, CA, Ruba was founded by serial entrepreneurs Mike Cassidy and Arnaud Weber.

Ruba.com is positioned as a community that is passionate about finding and sharing the greatest travel places (hotels, restaurants, attractions, hidden gems, etc.) worldwide.

Ruba highlighted that for the past 15 months, the team has worked “to create a unique and fun visual travel site and community focused on guides, photos, maps, and interactive tour listings to improve the online travel research experience”.

Ruba was backed by two Silicon Valley venture capital firms--Benchmark Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

This is Google’s second iGoogle-related acquisition in less than a month.

Last month, Google acquired iGoogle widget developer LabPixies in order to “anchor the company’s iGoogle efforts across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.”